A Cloud-based Architecture for Mitigating Privacy Issues in Online Social Networks

Online social media networks have revolutionized the way information is shared across our societies and around the world. Information is now delivered for free to a large audience within a short period of time. Anyone can publish news and information and become a content creator over the internet. However, along with these benefits is the privacy issue that raises a serious concern due to incidences of privacy breaches in Online Social Networks (OSNs). Various projects have been developed to protect users’ privacy in OSNs. This paper discusses those projects and analysestheir pros and cons. Then it proposes a new cloud-based model to shield up OSNs users against unauthorized disclosure of their private data. The model supports both trusted (private) as well as untrusted (3rd party) clouds. An efficiency analysis is provided at the end to show that the proposed model offers a lot of improvements over existing ones.